Adam Lashinsky’s new book lifts the lid on what it’s really like to work for one of the world’s most secretive organisations. He talks to Amy Willis…
According to Inside Apple, Apple is a glut of windowless offices, a neutering of egos and an ethos of fear with “cultish” overtones.
A 12,000-person mile-round glass mothership is about to land in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Futuristic, with its own self-contained electricity plant: plans for Apple’s new disc-shaped headquarters encompass the lasting legacy of the late Steve Jobs – a slick design, with an uber-efficient core.
Over the years dozens of technophiles, seduced by three decades of technological smut, have made the pilgrimage to One Infinite Loop, Apple’s current base in Cupertino, in the hope of getting under the skin of the highly-secretive company.
Few make it inside the main Apple building. A throng of security guards greets them instead, escorting them back onto the sidewalk, sometimes pointing them in the direction of the on-campus shop where they can buy a token Apple T-Shirt.
But a new book, released in the UK this week, finally gives a non-partisan insight into life as an Apple employee. And it isn’t what most expect.
According to Inside Apple, Apple is a glut of windowless offices, a neutering of egos and an ethos of fear with “cultish” overtones.
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NOAAWatch: All-Hazard Monitor “NOAAWatch offers the latest updates on severe weather and hazardous conditions.”
Mostly only male birds sing and they do so to protect their territory and to attract a mate.- Provided by The World Almanac 2012
Analysis: The How and Why of Modern Assassinations .
Experts fear diseases ‘impossible to treat’.
Dogs do understand human emotions .
Biggest Pricing Errors in History | moneysupermarket.com.
A PC that thinks like a man, has an IQ of 150 – .
Phone and email records to be stored in new spy plan .
- Are search engine result figures accurate?.
Friday night F&F document dump shows “extensive” communication with White House .
News – 7 steps to a flu-free computer workstation.
The Voynich Manuscript: Interesting Thing of the Day.
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Who Was Charlie Chaplin?
One of the most iconic film stars of the early 20th century, Charlie Chaplin may not have been who he claimed. At the request of US authorities, who suspected Chaplin of being a communist sympathizer, British intelligence launched an investigation into the actor’s background in the 1950s but came up empty-handed. Chaplin claimed to have been born in London on April 16, 1889, but newly declassified MI5 documents reveal that agents could find no record of his birth anywhere. The report concludes that Chaplin was either born outside the country or had a different name at birth. More …
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The Paley Center for Media, which has locations in both New York and LA, dedicates itself to the preservation of television and radio history. Inside their vast archives of more than 120,000 television shows, commercials, and radio programs, there are thousands of important and funny programs waiting to be rediscovered by comedy nerds like you and me. Each week, this column will highlight a new gem waiting for you at the Paley Library to quietly laugh at. (Seriously, it’s a library, so keep it down.)
At the beginning of the 1940s, the Marx Brothers had announced their retirement as a team. And, okay, they made two more movies to help settle some of Chico’s gambling debts, but for the most part the three of them had moved on. Chico began fronting an orchestra and Harpo was making solo public appearances. It wasn’t long into this lull that Groucho felt the need to strike out on his own and find a new venue for his brand of humor. He found just what he needed in radio, as the host of the quiz show You Bet Your Life. Although, to call it a quiz show seems a little inaccurate. There were contestants, questions and cash prizes, but they all served as the framing device to let Groucho showcase his quick wit.
If you’ve seen or heard You Bet Your Life (first of all, you have no excuse since they’re in the public domain and you can download them for free at archive.org) the game itself was pretty inconsequential. There would be two contestants brought on from the audience, and Groucho would banter with them, making comments and jokes as they went along. As Hector Arce puts it in his biography Groucho, “The contestants were carrying the conversational ball and, to a large degree, Groucho was being cast as the world’s funniest straight man.”
MORE.
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Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that’s only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
READ.
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Mexican authorities announced Feb. 8 the largest seizure of methamphetamine in Mexican history — and possibly the largest ever anywhere — on a ranch outside of Guadalajara. The total haul was 15 tons of pure methamphetamine along with a laboratory capable of producing all the methamphetamine seized. While authorities are not linking the methamphetamine to any specific criminal group, Guadalajara is a known stronghold of the Sinaloa Federation, and previous seizures there have been connected to the group.
Methamphetamine, a synthetic drug manufactured in personal labs for decades, is nothing new in Mexico or the United States. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has led numerous crusades against the drug, increasing regulations on its ingredients to try to keep it from gaining a foothold in the United States. While the DEA’s efforts have succeeded in limiting production of the drug in the United States, consumption has risen steadily over the past two decades. The increasing DEA pressure on U.S. suppliers and the growing demand for methamphetamine have driven large-scale production of the drug outside the borders of the United States. Given Mexico’s proximity and the pervasiveness of organized criminal elements seeking new markets, it makes sense that methamphetamine would be produced on an industrial scale there. Indeed, Mexico has provided an environment for a scale of production far greater than anything ever seen in the United States.
Mexican authorities announced Feb. 8 the largest seizure of methamphetamine in Mexican history — and possibly the largest ever anywhere — on a ranch outside of Guadalajara. The total haul was 15 tons of pure methamphetamine along with a laboratory capable of producing all the methamphetamine seized. While authorities are not linking the methamphetamine to any specific criminal group, Guadalajara is a known stronghold of the Sinaloa Federation, and previous seizures there have been connected to the group.
Read MORE>
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Metropolitan Museum of Art Opens in New York City (This Day in 1872)
“The Met” is the foremost repository of art in the US, with a collection of more than two million works of art. Established for the purpose of encouraging the study of fine art, the museum opened in 1872 with just one stone sarcophagus and 174 paintings. However, the collection quickly outgrew its gallery space and in 1880 was moved to its iconic present-day location on the eastern edge of Central Park. In recent decades, the Met has used what controversial practice to acquire high-quality art? More…
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Everything you know about dieting is wrong
Obesity rates have doubled worldwide in the past 30 years, coinciding with a growing food surplus, and the ensuing epidemic has sparked a multibillion dollar weight loss industry that has largely failed to curb the problem.
Current standards in the United States, where two thirds of people are overweight or obese, advise people that cutting calories by a certain amount will result in a slow and steady weight loss over time.
But that advice fails to account for how the body changes as it slims down, burning less energy and acquiring a slower metabolism, researchers told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver.
The result is a plateau effect that ends up discouraging dieters and sending them back into harmful patterns of overeating.
As an example, researcher Kevin Hall offered up his large vanilla latte, purchased at a popular coffee shop. When he asked, the barista told him it contained about 240 calories.
“The notion was if I drank one of these every day and then I replaced it with just black coffee no sugar, then over the course of a year I should lose about 25 pounds, and that should just keep going,” Hall told reporters.
Read HERE.
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If in the year 2000 the U.S. president had told the American people that the government would soon begin using robot planes to track people, including U.S. citizens, all over the world, and would reserve to itself the right to kill them without trial, it is safe to say there would have been an enormous uproar. But that is exactly what is happening today, and nobody cares. The majority of Americans, including those who were opposed to the war in Iraq, have no problems with their government killing at will, so long as the killing is done in the name of “national security.”
How did this happen? In retrospect, the war in Afghanistan was the prime culprit. That endless, Sisyphean war was the thin end of the wedge. In that murky, shifting struggle, it was normal for the U.S. to arrogate to itself the right to kill the Taliban wherever they were in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Once that precedent was established, it was an small step to killing bad guys in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. And so, by imperceptible steps we arrived at the place we are now, where 77 percent of liberals support President Obama’s vastly expanded killer drone campaign, where an American citizen can be remotely vaporized at the touch of a button and no one cares. The war on Afghanistan set the precedent that shaped the entire “war on terror” paradigm. The chimera of “safety from terrorism” led us by easy stages to begin waging dirty war across the globe — changing the definition of war, eroding moral and legal standards and greatly increasing the likelihood of ugly future consequences.
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This is an awesome tattoo!
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Wandering Google Maps can reveal magical geographies. When preparing for a recent first-time trip to Vancouver, I started zooming in and out and around the area to see what the surroundings are like. That was how I first learned of the existence of Point Roberts, Washington.
The town sits about 20 miles directly south of Vancouver, on a little peninsular tip of land, jutting just below the 49th parallel. That’s the line, as you probably know, that generally demarcates the separation between Canada and the United States, at least from the middle of Minnesota westward. This borderline cuts between Blaine, Washington, and White Rock, British Columbia, the two counterpoint cities of this west coast end of the U.S.-Canada border. But through the waters of Boundary Bay, the line keeps heading west, true along the 49th and directly through the peninsula at this tip of British Columbia. To the south of the line sits Point Roberts, a 5-square mile fingernail of B.C. that is actually part of the United States.
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Archaeologists working in eastern Jordan have announced the discovery of 20,000-year-old hut structures, the earliest yet found in the Kingdom. The finding suggests that the area was once intensively occupied and that the origins of architecture in the region date back twenty millennia, before the emergence of agriculture.
The research, published 15 February, 2012 in PLoS One by a joint British, Danish, American and Jordanian team, describes huts that hunter-gatherers used as long-term residences and suggests that many behaviours that have been associated with later cultures and communities, such as a growing attachment to a location and a far-reaching social network, existed up to 10,000 years earlier.
Excavations at the site of Kharaneh IV are providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago. Although the area is starkly dry and barren today, during the last Ice Age the deserts of Jordan were in bloom, with rivers, streams, and seasonal lakes and ponds providing a rich environment for hunter-gatherers to settle in.
“What we witness at the site of Kharaneh IV in the Jordanian desert is an enormous concentration of people in one place,” explained Dr. Jay Stock from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the article.
MORE.
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I’ve been thinking about constructive criticism–the kind we give to graduate students or mentees–and how they receive it. Over the past few years I’ve noticed a bit of push back from students and mentees. My faculty friends and colleagues have told me they get the same kind of push back. Now, don’t misunderstand me, there is nothing wrong with push back–you have to stand up for what you believe. However, I’ve watched individuals struggle and have difficulty with their job search while neglecting to follow any of the advice their mentors have given them. Sometimes these students are headstrong. Other times they are convinced that they know what is best and that they know how to build a faculty career. Here are a few examples:
I have had students and mentees who present at academic conferences on a regular basis but they don’t publish the resulting papers. Many times, I’ve attended their conference presentations and have been thoroughly impressed with their ideas and skill. I always follow up, asking them to revise the paper and send it to a journal. However, unlike their counterparts who follow my advice, these students put the paper away for months, sometimes years, and it is no longer relevant or others have already published similar work. When they receive feedback from prospective employers that questions their lack of publications, they are frustrated.
Other students and mentees are interested in everything and refuse to focus. I often tell these students that they have a lifetime to pursue their research interests and that focusing on one or two areas of research is advantageous. Still, they continue to be interested in everything. Again, there is nothing wrong with curiosity and a wide interest. However, focus leads to success in research. It’s better to finish one peer-reviewed article than to have started the introduction for 10. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve seen students do this.
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